You’re going to be hard-pressed to find an Android phone with less than a 3 megapixel rear-facing camera. The better the camera, the larger the image is. Almost all images are stored on external storage, but if you take a lot of images, you will either need a really large card or need a way to make the images smaller. Since you don’t want to lose the quality of the image, you will need a way to better optimize it for storage on your Android. Image Optimizer will shrink images to save space on your Android.
If you’re familiar with GIMP or Photoshop, you might be aware of an option called “Save for the Web“. Basically this feature compresses the image and takes out all the bits of information not needed in the picture while still retaining quality. That’s what Image Optimizer does for images on your Android device.
Here’s an example of what the compressed image size can be.
As you can see, the image was compressed to over fifty percent its original size. Using Image Optimizer to shrink images to save space is fairly easy. When you open the application, you’ll immediately see all of the images available on your phone or tablet. To choose an image or images to optimize, tap on the image. When you have all of the images chosen, press the button at the bottom of the screen to start optimizing.
This is one of those unique applications that has one purpose and one purpose only. It’s not cluttered with tons of extra features or options to weigh it down.
The default settings do a decent job of compressing the image. The compression setting is set to compress up to seventy-five percent. Depending on the size of the image, this can take a little while. If you have multiple images it can take even longer. If you require more compression or optimization, you can go into the settings and increase the optimization level or compression percentage. Keep in mind these will increase the amount of time it takes to optimize the image.
There is a difference in the way PNG and JPG images are handled. With a PNG image about 600 KB, and all of the compression and optimization settings cranked up as high as they would go, it took about two minutes to optimize the image on a single core processor tablet. After the image was optimized, the size of the image only went down about 100 kB. While this performance is decent, a JPG image will allow for much more size reduction.
As with any image compression, there is always the possibility of the image being slightly distorted or showing a loss of quality. You can play around with the settings to find a happy medium between the compressed size and retention of quality.
Final Words
No matter where you’re storing your images, at some point you are likely going to need more space. Getting into the habit of compressing or optimizing your images might not be a bad habit to learn.
What do you do when you need to shrink images to save space?
Trevor is a freelance writer covering topics ranging from the Android OS to free web and desktop applications. When he is not writing about mobile productivity, He is coaching and playing the world’s greatest game… Soccer.
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